Parascale to enter cloud storage

Sajai Krishan, the company's chief executive, said the investment would be used to finalize the company's Parascale Cloud Storage (PCS) software, but he did not disclose the exact release date of the software. "We will announce a product and get a lot of users over the next few months," he said. We did not determine the date of release of the product, the investment will be used for this product marketing and expansion testing. ”

Parascale uses Linux based servers to create a large file network with more application requirements, including one or more virtual file systems in the file network.

PCS is the latest virtualization technology product developed by Parascale, and its target customers are service providers and rich media companies that want to provide cloud services.

Parascale first announced its virtual storage network (VSN) technology last year, which says its virtual storage network technology can connect Dell, HP or IBM's individual Linux file servers and SATA storage to form a network. While virtual storage network technology has now been repackaged as PCs, the virtual storage network file network supports capacity that is independent of hardware and up to petabytes of capacity, Parascale said. "The storage community has begun to consider cloud storage technology," Krishnan explains. With the hype of vendors such as VMware, Xen, and Microsoft, everything about virtualization becomes confusing. ”

Krishnan said most of the venture-capital gains will be used to develop PCs ' automated management capabilities, which he considers to be a vital feature for users.

"We allow users to use many general-purpose Linux servers," he said. When users add these devices to the cloud storage, system administrators often spend a lot of time managing them. ”

Cloud storage may still be in a relatively early phase, but despite this, parascale still faces stiff competition, with its rivals including clustered NAS vendors such as Isilon and Amazon and other emerging storage service providers.

Krishnan said Parascale would face difficulties and build up his position in the market, stressing that the company's PCs cost less than Isilon and Amazon's S3 services.

"With Parascale products, you can bring down the cost of services like Amazon S3 in less than six months and PCs are not as demanding on hardware as Isilon IQ products," he said. But we can't compete with big manufacturers like IBM, HP and Dell. ”

Krishnan revealed that 5 users are now testing Parascale PCs, but he only released the identities of 1 of them, the WAN optimizer specialist blue Coat Bae.

Blue Coat is testing the use of PCs to manage 3TB of storage on the Gigabit Ethernet network based on the Dell PowerEdge server. It is trying to use Parascale products as a disk to disk backup library, which speeds up file backup and recovery. "They've been testing for nearly two years and people are putting important data on our software, so we have to make sure it's reliable," Krishnan said. ”

Krishnan did not say how many employees parascale now, but said the total number of employees is within 50 people. He added: "By this time next year, our numbers will be a little bit higher." ”